Slashdot Log In
Linux As a Model For a New Government?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Oct 18, 2008 10:19 AM
from the i'm-X,-and-i-release-this-message-under-the-GPL dept.
from the i'm-X,-and-i-release-this-message-under-the-GPL dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"
Related Stories
Firehose:Linux cited as model for new government by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Insightful)
How long does it take to make a phone call?
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Informative)
'...have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery.'
This is an old idea, of course, most recently known as 'meritocracy', a term that many people are unaware was originally intended to be pejorative. Here's what Michael Young (who coined the term in the 50s) had to say about this type of system in business and politics back in 2001, well before the current economic mess:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/jun/29/comment [guardian.co.uk]
'The business meritocracy is in vogue. If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get. They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side. So assured have the elite become that there is almost no block on the rewards they arrogate to themselves. The old restraints of the business world have been lifted and, as the book also predicted, all manner of new ways for people to feather their own nests have been invented and exploited.'
Parent
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux works because if you don't like what Linus is doing you can fork it, or use one of the BSDs, or start your own operating system.
For example when people didn't like what Xfree86 was doing, they forked the code to x.org, and now that's what most people use.
It isn't so easy to fork your government if you don't like what they are doing.
Parent
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Informative)
Because communism has nothing to do with openness.
Quite the contrary, virtually all communist systems (there are many flavours) of past and present are particularly jealous of interference, be it from the inside or outside and it is probably one of the most conservative systems around.
I therefore suggest you start reading up on the subject before you fuck up during a next election.
Parent
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Insightful)
No implemented perpetuum mobile in existance was close to what self sustained energy source really means. If you're an idealist, a perpetuum mobile is still the best energy source out there, in theory. Unfortunately, it's the hardest to implement in practice.
Parent
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How long before it became corrupt? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Right-Wing Misinformation Alert (Score:5, Informative)
Berkshire Hathaway is Warren Buffet's company. Berkshire Hathaway does not specialize in "estate tax insurance and planning" which is not a "huge part" of their business. Berkshire Hathaway sells all sorts of things including electricity, candy, and insurance. But nobody sells "estate tax insurance" since people can only insure themselves against risks not known liabilities.
Before anybody listens to the parent's allegations of conflict of interest (which he curiously portrays as a phenomenon unique to the Democratic Party) I think it's fair to demand the following evidence:
BTW, I'm really excited to hear that url for estate tax insurance. Gosh, maybe he even sells other tax insurance, like income tax insurance! That would be awesome. Geeze, it seems like I have to pay that one every year.
Wait-a-minute! That's why buffet is supporting Obama's tax hike for the rich: He's going to make a mint selling the income tax insurance! Oh Buffet, you are a wiley one!
Parent
A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind. I'm sure like communism it might work well in theory.
Democracy is basic open source government. You get what you put in. Adding in a republic aspect allows you to have some higher level maintainers to keep things orderly and to occasionally make unpopular decisions for the good of the project. Yes, it's potentially open to corruption, but as long as the democratic process itself isn't corrupted, repairs can be made.
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Funny)
Soon, there are so many government distributions, each with their own election managers and schedulers (some completely fair, some not) that nobody knows which government is best for them. They only know it sometimes won't sell wireless and sometimes the open source penal code is not 100% compatible with new versions of the city manager and some people keep getting called 'blobs'.
I'm sure that someday will be the 'year of open source on the government' and one of the distributions will Linspire us to all wear little red hats instead of tin foil. What a Novell idea!
We'll be laughing all the way to the bank about our new, freee government until the judge hits us with patent infringement and says gleefully, "RTFM Noob!" as he issues the kill -9 sentence on us.
Parent
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source is a much closer model for no government - or, in other words, anarchy. The last few years have been pretty clear to me that democracy doesn't produce government that works in the people's best interest. A linux model for government would allow people to choose how to organize themselves on a voluntary basis. Government, even the democratic version, rests on the application of force. So the two ideals really are mutually exclusive.
Parent
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that has much more to do with the fact that people get the government they deserve, rather than failings in democracy per se. Most Americans no longer know, or have any desire to know, economics, civics, how their government works, or even their own history. They then run out and vote like the uneducated idiots they are, voting for whoever "looks most presedential" or "has promised them x" (pretty much whoever schmoozes best or promises most). Americans have been lazy and lately have not placed much priority on these basic educational building blocks, and are now getting the government they deserve. We, as Americans, are largely idiots en masse, so is it any wonder our leaders are all idiots en masse as well? One could argue that our democracy is working exactly as it should be, as it is supposed to be a representative form of government, and it is uncomfortably representative at the moment. In America, when our government starts to suck, we should really turn inward and examine ourselves, because our government is a pretty good mirror reflecting our own failings as individuals.
And as for the whole application of force thing, anarchy will be government by force. Whoever is strongest will come along and either kill you or control you. To use the linux analogy, you will be like a process that voluntarilly used the nice command on itself, and is trying to get along and give other processes their fair share priority. And other not so nice processes will take the CPU, and will choose not to let you run again.
This is why the nice command does nothing in modern unix OS's: if you count on the processes to work together and get organized, some greedy process will come along and spoil it for everyone. Therefore, we now have a scheduler that ignores niceness and uses force to give every process its basic rights.
Force trying to take away rights is always with us. If you don't overcome it with a stronger force that gives rights, you will become its slave.
Parent
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Funny)
Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind.
As a Mac user this sounds strangely familiar [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Insightful)
> Most of their proposals seem to be based on the idea of some sort of dictator, with everyone's best interests in mind.
Of course there are important differences between a project such as Linux and a government.
Linus works as benevolent dictator because:
a) he is a good dictator. Everyone knows a good king is the best form of government, but nobody has ever solved the problem of evsuring a steady supply of good kings.
b) If enough people were to ever decide Linus were a bad dictator that can use the GPL to remove him with a minimum of fuss. In the real world removing a dictator involves a wee bit more effort.
c) Being a highly technical project focused on making the 'best kernel' it is easy to get agreement on most issues since everyone agrees on the meaning of 'best' after a few arguments and benchmark runs. Now consider the socialist/capitalist divide where there is zero agreement as to the definition of a 'good' government. Makes Windows vs Linux a petty squabble.
Not to mention the inescapable fact George Soros is a communist opposed to everything our form of government stands for so anybody who gives that asshole the time of day on the idea of reforming our government should be suspect.
Parent
Re:A lot of my "liberal" friends seem to agree (Score:5, Funny)
Logistics?
If the Dow loses 15% of its value we don't have to figure out where to hide all the lost dollars. Lose 15% of the human population and you either have to find lots of grave space or learn to live with the stench.
Parent
Fork. (Score:5, Insightful)
And which one to choose, there are so many! Would it be possible to try each fork on my family first in a sort of LiveGOV program instead of committing to one particular fork of the government?
Re:Fork. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the lack of the ability to easily fork may be one of the most deeply ingrained flaws and problems with current political systems. It's a privilege largely reserved for corporations and/or the very rich, to easily change into and out of what political system you currently prefer.
It would be interesting to explore the options of more modular political systems where citizens, when they dislike their unit enough, could reasonably easily disengage and join another unit. A system could be designed on multiple dimensions ranging from geographic protection through healtcare through trade-related aspects, and comprise both low-level units up to world spanning organizations. If nothing else it might at least provide more interesting and intellectually challenging politics.
Parent
Re:Fork. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not just say it's the far right. There are plenty of centrists such as myself who happen to own firearms and hunt would are very wary of Soros. He gives a lot of money to gun control organizations and would strip us of our current rights.
I wouldn't want to live in a country Soros was running.
Parent
Idiotic (Score:5, Insightful)
terrible idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:terrible idea (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, the OpenBSD model is clearly superior.
Imagine the State of the Union addresses.
Parent
Well for one thing, it has to be paid for..... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but even now as we pay taxes, we should be telling the government what we want them to spend it on.
This way any election of persons "running' the government can at worse just bias such usage rather then run us into the ground with misusing your taxes and leaving us low and wet with no retirement or healthcare.
Someone said to me, when I suggested we tell the government "for the people by the people" how to spend our taxes, that the constitution of the US says we do not have the right to question how the government spends our taxes.
I agreed and said we will not question them, we will instead tell them how to use it.
The Linux ideal was applied when this country was first started, "for the people by the people" and reason, specific reasons, given is found in the "Declaration of Independence."
As an example of Government Abuse today, if you genuinely uphold the "Declaration of Independence" you WILL BE LABELED A TERRORIST and put of list of such people!
might not completely worked (Score:5, Insightful)
The last time we tried to fork the US, it didn't work too well. But actually, I do think that this could be the germ of a new idea, experimental modes of government in test communities. People will argue the pro's and con's back and forth but until the theories have been put to the test, it's just speculation. The only problem I've seen is that when a bad idea is proven to be such in a proper experiment, the true believers won't say the idea was flawed, it simply was not applied with enough vigor. We're thus back where we started, only the true believers are crazier for it.
The thing I keep coming back to is that rigidly hierarchical models of direction and control were necessary in the pre-computer age. Just imagine trying to keep up with documents and records when they're all held on sheets of paper in real folders in real file drawers, just imagine trying to communicate with someone when long-distance communication is just scratchy phone lines and letters. It makes sense to concentrate all of the command and control in one place and issue orders from there, capital cities, corporate HQ's and all.
With modern telecommunications, it will be easier to push the brains of the organization out to the periphery. Just drawing from my own experience, I've worked in several different corporate environments starting with food services, then telecommunications, then a mixture of small and big shops for computers and financial services. The thing that really struck me about the chain stores is that they took away the initiative from the store manager. A place could not vary from corporate standard and while this sets a base line of acceptable quality, nobody was allowed to rise above that level, either. What also happened is that management refused to accept feedback from the stores, the front lines of the business, so when they tried to implement stupid ideas, they never got the feedback that it wasn't working; either they didn't ask for it or wouldn't listen.
Just talking about restaurants, the strength of the traditional franchise is national brand recognition, expensive marketing and research efforts to develop products for the menu, and a proven formula for success that simply needs to be adopted and adhered to. Of course, this also means that you'll often get crap. If I compare the local Denny's with the local breakfast and lunch place, there's no comparison, the local mom and pop kicks the shit out of Denny's and their "real breakfast" bullshit. Of course, Denny's gets huge advantages of scale with purchasing, etc.
What I think would be interesting is if the mom and pops could create co-ops to do the same thing nation-wide. "Look, we're all individuals but together we represent a thousand restaurants. We promise to buy in this quantity at these prices, and if anyone drops out, the rest of the members will pick up the slack." Very hard to do 30 years ago but with computers these days, should be far easier.
When I was a kid, the strength of the capitalist versus communist economies was described as demand versus command. Command economies tried to decide everything from the capital city and they really had no clue how many paperclips were needed, would set unrealistic production goals and would never have the right amount. A demand economy places the paperclip decision at the level of the people buying the paperclips and the people making the paperclips -- a better understanding of the need for paperclips helps limit the production to just as much as is necessary. This decentralizes the bureaucracy.
Can the same thing be done at the federal level? Break the monolithic agencies into smaller "franchises" with the same goal but offices spread throughout the nation, all following the same game plan but fully cognizant of what's going on at the front lines? Can we bring back a meritocracy where the successful succeed and the failures go away? That used to be the strength of the western capitalist economies but now we allow such concentration of resources in oversized companies that are "too big to fail" that we've arrived at the same inefficiencies as the communist nations.
The solution is so simple that it hurts... (Score:5, Interesting)
All "modern" government systems (democracy, communism, you name it), or in fact, all government systems until now, had one giant elephant of a problem sitting right there in the middle of the room:
There are humans governing others.
Now continue to read before you judge.
The problem behind this is, that those people have a conflict of interest, between the needs of the governed and their own interests. So the ideal leader would be someone, where those two match perfectly.... which is of course impossible. But you can approximate it.
The problem with this is, that we have no reliable way of selecting such a person. Mostly because normal people can be tricked pretty easily.
But there is one new solution, that just came up when computers and the Internet got available everywhere:
Do not use an humans, but a very simple mathematical model (one that is so simple that every educated human can check it for himself), that calculates descisions out of the votes of a model of cascading trust relationships. This sounds complicated but it's very simple. (If you know how CSS decides, what rules apply to a HTML element, you already know it.)
In reality, it would work like this:
There is a set of things, where a decision has to be taken. That set is defined by people having differences in these points. Now someone - the typical role, that a politician would fill today - can create decisions for that set. Then another one can say "I want what he wants.... but, i want this specific thing to be different". Of course someone can use the results of that as his base too. And you can combine partial sets too, as you like. For example, you could say "I'm a liberal, but I agree with person X on family matters and person Y on science matters. oh, and I want social skills to be taught in school."
That way you could form a nice set of your own views without voting for every shit out there. (Because, it should make your life better, not worse :)
Now of course, this does not mean that you can get everything you want... because you live in a community.
So you assign yourself to a community/communities (country, state, town) (those are cascading too, and you can define which one has priority over which), and your views will merge with those of the community, to create the rules for that group of people.
So a conflict of interest would not be possible, because you could change your set of rules at any time.
Now there would of course be one simple limitation: You have to be in the same group with people that you share resources (land, water, jobs) with, when it comes to that matter (land, water, jobs). This could be automatically solved via a GPS input (or something similar).
I think that would work great. You could even extensively test it in parallel to the current system, round out all problems, and if it works, you can simply let all people join that system by themselves, until the old government does not matter anymore and goes away. So there is also no need for a "transient" government, like in communism, which for some reason never seems to end its job of transition (again a conflict of interest).
This idea of mine is open and I do not care who implements it, as long as you do not create a slightly modified system that becomes evil, and still associate it with me!
Re:No "good" government (Score:5, Insightful)
Alexander Tyler (a Scottish history professor at the
University of Edinburgh) had this to say about 'the fall of
the Athenian Republic' some 2,000 years prior.
'A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy
will continue to exist up until the time that voters
discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from
the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority
always votes for the candidates who promise the most
benefits from the public treasury, with the result that
every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal
policy, [which is] always followed by a dictatorship.
'The average age of the world's greatest civilizations
from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.
During those 200 years, these nations always progressed
through the following sequence:
'From bondage to spiritual faith;
'From spiritual faith to great courage;
'From courage to liberty;
'From liberty to abundance;
'From abundance to complacency;
'From complacency to apathy;
'From apathy to dependence;
'From dependence back into bondage.
Parent